In order to continuously supply a web consuming apparatus with web from a succession of rolls of web material, each new roll must be spliced to the preceding roll. Desirably, this is done without diminishing the rate of forwarding web to the web consuming apparatus. As such, a continuous supply of convolutely wound rolls of web material must be supplied to the apparatus in order to maintain the manufacturing speeds necessary for the production of disposable absorbent articles such as diapers and catamenial devices.
Today, in most manufacturing sites, manual operation remains the most common method for material handling and delivery. In most operations, the assembled products materials are processed on-line as webs and a vast majority of these web materials are brought to the line as planetary rolls of convolutely wound rolls of web material.
It will also be appreciated that raw material handling accounts for 30-50% of operational tasks across an assembled products manufacturing line today. This includes delivery, staging, roll preparation, and loading. Additionally, increasing line speeds increases the frequency of roll changes and drives higher operational efforts. In short, the manual loading of roll materials into an assembled products line is often found to be cost prohibitive.
Further, the floor space necessary today for unwind stands and raw material staging is roughly equal to the space necessary for the placement of an assembled goods converting operation. Additionally, future innovation tends to bring more complex assembled goods products and requires significantly more web materials. This can confound current manufacturing operations as floor space is likely fully used already. Therefore, finding additional floor space to accommodate both the existing assembled products lines and the expanded requirements to accommodate these additional lines is problematic.
Some solutions to this issue have been to utilize additional floor space to incorporate automation solutions. Floor space is at a premium. Current automation solutions provide significant safety concerns due to the increased risk of human injury or equipment damage. Others have provided additional equipment formats such as festooning, traversing wound rolls, and the like to extend roll life and reduce manual effort required to load such materials. However, these solutions only work for a limited range of materials.
There is a compelling need to eliminate the manual effort required to stage, prepare, load, and thread up web materials to feed the converting equipment to manufacture assembled goods such as catamenial devices and diapers. There is a compelling need to reduce the floor space required for material staging, preparation, loading, and unwind convolutely wound materials, inclusive of automation. Further, there is a compelling need to enable a ‘lights-out’ web material supply solution that is nearly capital equal to current unwind operations. Additionally, there is a compelling need to support agile manufacturing principles on converting lines that enable easy reconfigurability. Thus, it would be beneficial to solve these challenges of footprint, effort, and cost simultaneously. The present description solves these challenges.